Watch Dogs – will players be free to decide their own moral vision of the game's world, and what does that mean for the narrative?

There’s an interesting question that reverberates through the history of game design – and will only become louder in the next generation era. It is a question about story and agency, narrative and gameplay, it is about the notion of freedom within ever larger virtual environments. The question is this: how does an open-world game tell a story that resonates with every player when one of the strengths of this genre is that it offers us infinite opportunities to mess with the narrative?

On the last gen, noble protagonists would often become psychos in the hands of players. In LA Noire, you were supposed to be a cop solving a series of murders, but you could also mow down pedestrians with reckless abandon. Players who did this should have seen their version of Cole Phelps banged up in the same padded cell as the murderer he was putting away, but no – the game carries on regardless. Some insiders almost apologetically refer to this phenomenon as ludonarrative dissonance – the mismatch of story and gameplay. The only open world games to successfully navigated the grey area between agency and narrative have done so by either embracing the tendency of players to behave like sociopaths (Prototype, Grand Theft Auto 5) or by playing everything for laughs (the Saints Row franchise).

The future of freedom

If the next generation of open-world games are to truly move the genre forward, they will require next gen thinking and this can’t just come in the form of power trip stories, increased environment space and online modes. Since open-world games are largely character-driven, at some point developers are going to have to try and take a stab at marrying the concerns of their game’s plot with the fact that the player is entirely off the leash.

Watch Dogs may not solve this problem wholly, but it makes a square go of it. It doesn’t cage the player, but it doesn’t let them off, either. Instead it allows you to plough through the environment like a combine harvester, while hurling moral fishhooks into your face.

Hacking systems will be a key element of the game, but how about social engineering?

It’s been a while since we last heard from Ubisoft on its ambitious cyberpunk thriller, so here’s a re-cap. In an alternative version of modern day Chicago, the covert activities of a vigilante named Aiden Pearce have taken a rather personal toll. Pearce has graduated from adolescent street thug to keyboard warrior; his hacking and social engineering skills ensured he made plenty of underworld contacts, while his aptitude for antisocial behaviour have driven him towards a multitude of clandestine activities and scams.

Unfortunately, the latter have resulted in a group of heavies coming after him, and ultimately, the death of his niece. Pearce is now out for revenge against forces that are still bent on his destruction. Driven by guilt and a primal need for survival, Pearce sets about tracking down those who have spread misery and pain into his life.

People as objects

Yes, this premise sounds like fairly standard stuff in video games – a damaged antihero raging against the machine – but in the case of Watch Dogs it’s necessary to put players in Pearce’s headspace. Since he’s a hacker, Pearce is very used to regarding pretty much everyone in his immediate vicinity as simply a means to an end or… well, nothing. People are non-entities on the other end of a Wi-Fi connection. On top of that, Pearce is single-minded when it comes to his goals and he possesses a sort of ethical tunnel vision when it comes to accomplishing them.

In other words, Pearce’s mind-set bears a stark similarity to that of your average player. Everything’s permitted because nothing is real. People are pixels. Violence is a tool. Any altercation resulting in the death of an innocent doesn’t matter, because they weren’t real people to begin with.

Pearce’s attitude allows the player into his head. But don’t think that the developers let the player off that easy. As they wander through the game’s open world map – a rather realistic representation of the Windy City – players can activate the Profiler feature on Pearce’s phone, which sucks in the data from the smartphones of any NPC in his vicinity.

In future open-world games, will players have to be more mindful of how they treat non-player characters?

This is useful for gathering resources, since snatching bank details and social data out of the air is as easy for Pearce as breathing. However, he also picks up personal details of the people around him. A woman battling bipolar disorder, a man embroiled in a vicious custody battle with his ex-wife, and the concerned aunt of an abused child are simply three examples plucked out of the datasphere in Watch Dogs. As the NPCs become small pockets of humanity, the developers prick the conscience of each individual player. They don’t allow participants a complete abdication from responsibility for Pearce’s actions. If you’re going to mug this guy on the street, what will happen to him and his family?

That may not concern you and Pearce can be as violent or as heartless as the player likes. But in the end, it seems that the way people play Watch Dogs will say a lot about their moral fibre – or lack thereof. True, it doesn’t look as though there will be gameplay consequences to wanton destruction, although there is a reputation gauge that changes depending on every action. But perhaps that’s part of the evolution, freeing player morality from the simple “gamified” systems we’ve seen in the likes of Fable and Dishonored. It’s difficult to truly express your own moral countenance when there’s a potential scoring system to worry about.

Snuff movie morality

In many ways, Watch Dogs’s open world structure and its mechanics are similar to those in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Players are able to buy weapons, hijack cars and cause all manner of freewheeling mayhem that will attract the NPC cops like moths to a floodlight. But the deal it strikes with each individual player’s morality is more reminiscent of another Rockstar Games title: Manhunt.

Like that controversial snuff movie sim, Watch Dogs presents players with the choice to be merciful, often to the protagonist’s monetary detriment. But Manhunt’s torture porn pact only ever involved a choice on a scale of brutality visited on loathsome killers. Over the last generation, the evolving concept of agency has brought in more profound moral conundrums that have really pushed the concept of narrative and culpability to breaking point. The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, Walking Dead – all asked questions of us, that the plot couldn’t always accommodate. It’s a healthy problem to have. It means games are growing.

In Watch Dogs, player empathy is a factor in peripheral activities as well as the main storyline. The developers are teasing players to emotionally invest in the transitory background characters as well as the star cast members. It seems Watch Dogs is a universe in which randomly slaying passers-by is as likely to lead to guilt as it is to glee. It’s the kind of next-gen thinking the open-world genre – indeed, games development as a whole – requires.

• Watch Dogs is released on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One on 27 May. A Wii U release is as yet undated